Suchergebnisse

The Tropical Data Hub (TDH) as an e-Research initiative to provide a data hosting infrastructure to congregate significant tropical environmental data sets. Tropical regions support some of the world's most diverse and unique ecosystems. However, these sensitive areas are coming under increased pressures from human activities, which significantly threaten their sustainability into the future. Therefore, a need exists for more informed use of environmental monitoring procedures to help better manage tropical regions. At present data is collected in disjoint repositories and is not visible/accessible for reuse by other lines of enquiry. Without this data being publicised, many opportunities are missed for holistic discovery of major trends that influence tropical ecosystems. The TDH serves as a focal point for amalgamating disparate data sources to facilitate data reuse, integration/searching and knowledge discovery by environmental researchers and government departments. This will provide researchers and planners access to extensive and readily available data that can be used to give a more accurate representation of the state of tropical regions and allow for more suitable environmental management practices to be devised. We present two visualisation tools that model data from the Tropical Data Hub. The first is for assessing land space across Northern Australia and the second is a system to rapidly assess the potential impacts of climate change on global biodiversity.

Australia's northern savannas have among the highest fire frequencies in the world. The climate is monsoonal, with a long, dry season of up to 9 months, during which most fires occur. The Australian Government's Emissions Reduction Fund allows land managers to generate carbon credits by abating the direct emissions of CO2 equivalent gases via prescribed burning that shifts the fire regime from predominantly large, high-intensity late dry season fires to a more benign, early dry season fire regime. However, the Australian savannas are vast and there is significant variation in weather conditions and seasonality, which is likely to result in spatial and temporal variations in the commencement and length of late dry season conditions. Here, we assess the temporal and spatial consistency of the commencement of late dry season conditions, defined as those months that maximise fire size and where the most extreme fire weather conditions exist. The results demonstrate that significant yearly, seasonal and spatial variations in fire size and fire weather conditions exist, both within and between bioregions. The effective start of late dry season conditions, as defined by those months that maximise fire size and where the most extreme fire weather variables exist, is variable across the savannas.

The primary outcome of this project was to provide various stakeholders in the multifaceted barramundi fishery (including both the commercial/recreational wild fishery and aquaculture industry) with targeted scientific data and models assessing the vulnerability of this iconic species to future impacts of climate change. Access to this data will enable stakeholders to identify adaptation strategies and put in place informed planning processes ensuring the future viability of commercial and recreational activities dependent on the species. ; Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT). ; Non technical summary -- Acknowledgements -- Background -- Need -- Objectives -- Materials and methods -- Results/Discussion -- Benefits and adoption -- Planned outcomes -- Conclusions -- References -- Appendices ; The Fisheries Research and Development Corporation plans, invests in and manages fisheries research and development throughout Australia. It is a statutory authority within the portfolio of the Federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, jointly funded by the Australian Government and the fishing industry.